Press Announcements

James Clark, the Ronald Weintraub Professor of Biology, led an international team of researchers who discovered a new bird-like species of dinosaur called Xiyunykus pengi during an expedition to Xinjiang, China. The discovery fills in a missing evolutionary link for an enigmatic group of dinosaurs that share many characteristics with birds, including bird-like skulls and many small teeth instead of the large, sharp teeth seen in other dinosaurs.

A collection of censored political cartoons by fired Pittsburgh Post-Gazette artist Rob Rogers were first seen by a public audience at a nationally recognized Corcoran School of the Arts and Design exhibition titled “Spiked: The Unpublished Political Cartoons of Rob Rogers.” The gallery features 10 unpublished Rogers cartoons and eight sketches.

The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design acquired hundreds of sculptures, paintings and photographs from the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s permanent collection, laying the foundation for an estimable research collection that will be accessible to Corcoran students as well as faculty, staff and the public. The 18 paintings, 642 photographs, 93 prints and 15 sculptures gifted to the Corcoran School include works by Ansel Adams, Eugene Delacroix, Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark and William Wegman.

Professor of Chemistry Stuart Licht and his team of researchers are finalists in the $20 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE competition for their C2CNT project, a low-energy, low-cost method of transforming carbon dioxide into harmless and widely-used carbon nanotubes. The greenhouse gas reduction technology developed in Licht’s lab may potentially impact climate change.

Professor of Anthropology Alison Brooks led a team of international collaborators, including scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, that discovered evidence of early humans in East Africa using coloring materials and obtaining a range of raw materials from distant sources— activities which imply the existence of social networks—about 320,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought.

A study by Bernard Wood, professor of human origins at the GW Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, and a team of Columbian College alumni showed that the average brain size of human ancestors increased gradually over 3 million years, growing to more than three times larger than our closest living relatives.